Daniel Smith Watercolor Sticks: Product Review

I have been curious about these Watercolor Sticks since they first came out last fall.  I saw them in the Daniel Smith catalogue and saw the demonstrations and wondered how they would work for me.

I want to try doing more watercolour sketching while I am out and about.  I have a wonderful little half pan watercolour tin from Daniel Smith that I take when I travel.  I love the palette and little mixing wells, and the fact that I can put my own tube colours in the pans.  But it's not really convenient to put in my purse to have handy when the kids are in swimming lessons.

I got my set of Watercolor Sticks on Monday last week and I've been using them every day since then trying to see what they will do for me, and all the ways I can use them. They are handmade, about 3 inches long, and have no wax or oil binders, just enough gum arabic to hold them together. I put them in to a little cardboard box along with a size 4 travel brush and my moleskine watercolour sketchbook.  That was my whole sketching kit when I went to the coffee shop while my kids were in yoga class.

When I got to the coffee shop I ordered my latte, and asked for a small glass of water.  Then I sat down for an hour and experimented.

I drew on the page directly with the dry sticks, using them like pastels.  I layered my colours on and then when I was satisfied I wet the whole thing to see how the colours would react.

I did a light sketch with them and then painted directly, taking the paint from the stick with a wet brush.

And I wet the page, and drew on it with the dry stick.  Getting a really great loose picture. 

I tried wetting the sticks and drawing on the dry paper... (by far the most vivid application of colour)

I also did a hybrid kind of thing where I wet a small shape and tapped the stick on the wet shape to form my painting.  I like the folk arty feel of that – and I may use that for pieces at home, but it's time intensive  and not really a “sketching” technique.

I used the sticks on hot pressed, cold pressed and rough papers.  And I can say that if you are going to do direct drawing, either wet or dry, hot pressed paper is probably your best bet.  The rough really catches the pigment and unless I really scrubbed I couldn't smooth the lines out.  But for doing washes and quick paintings using the sticks like half pans (taking the pigment from them with wet brush) they are just as vibrant and workable as regular Daniel Smith paints.  And when they dry there is no "cloudiness" like I sometimes get with watercolour crayons or pencils.

They are seemingly expensive at $12 a stick, but I can tell you that they perform beautifully and with all the painting I've been doing this week they still look very new (aside from my drawing with the wet stick which did eat up more of the stick... eating up being a relative term one corner has been worn on the Cobalt Blue stick)   Daniel Smith says that each stick has the equivalent of two tubes of paint.  You could easily get the six primaries (there is a cool triad and a warm triad) and mix absolutely anything you need.  The extra landscape colours, the greens and browns are convenient but not necessary.

Mixing the colours on the page makes for a really great lively painting as well.

I am very happy with these sticks and I will be using them as my sketch kit this summer and will post the results as I am able to.